Reflection for practical 7

Purpose
The purpose of this website is to help parents whose kids have been addicted to drugs. The parents send in a file of the kids condition, and the website will help to find a course for the kid to attend, to attempt to change them.
Coverage

This website has a lot of courses to enroll deranged and drug abusing youths in. Wilderness programs, outdoor theraphy, boarding schools, therapeutic boarding schools, residential treatment centres, non public day schools, outpatient and day treatment, summer cams and programs. Under each separate section is the information, the cost and the durations of the appropriate course. There are always articles and tips on how to help the youths, and even job opportunities for the youths.
Authority

There are links to the schools, treatment centres, and all. This shows that is website is indeed well known.

Accuracy

With links to official websites, I see no reason that the information to be inaccurate, but I still double checked, and this websites gets a lot of their info from the schools, the centres, and various places that the youths can get jobs at. This website is accurate.
Currency
This website is updated regularly, as the latest update is 2007.

Accessibility
The site is easily accessed, as I found it from the first few results of google. No registration needed and all information is free.

Presentation and Arrangement
The information on the website is very well presented, there is a sitemap, which is very useful to users that are visiting for the 1st time. The arrangement of the information is good, however, the page could be aligned to centre to give better overall look. The colors don’t do so well though, its too mono.

Usability
It is easy to access the whole website, with the sitemap, and there is a search function to further enhance the searching of viewers. This makes the website quite user friendly.

Overall
This website is pretty good, as someone who also creates websites, I would give 7 over 10 for the whole website. Some useful links are placed at the bottom of the web, which makes it hard to see, and the colour is not very attractive.

That is an example of what i had done, there was 3, but this is only 1.

My reflection: As i had said, i thought of this as a revision for my eariler lessons. Basically this is the same thing as practical 6, just that this time its 3 instead of 1.

Reflection of practical 6

Purpose
The purposes of this website is nowhere to be seen, as this is a website that contains mostly reports.
Coverage

This website is about pushing back drugs, making the drug problem smaller, and I think that is the slogan for the website. There are many reports on drug abuse on the website. However, there are many links to other reports and this is a great way to organize the website.
Authority

There are links to official anti-drugs webpages, and reviews from people. It seems like this website is pretty well known.

Accuracy

With links to official websites, I see no reason that the information to be inaccurate, but I still double checked, and this websites gets a lot of their info from newspapers, and reports therefore the information is reliable.
Currency
This website is updated everyday, it is very up to date, and well mantained.

Accessibility
The site is easily accessed, as I found it from the first few results of google. Also, no registration or whatsoever is needed, and all the information is guaranteed free.

Presentation and Arrangement
The information on the website is very well presented, and there is a special part of the website with makes it different from others. There is a calendar at the right top of the website, and you can access reports uploaded on that day by clicking on the date. This makes the whole website easy to access. The report links are also neatly placed on sides of the webpage.

Usability
It is easy to access the whole website, and there is the calendar function with access to the reports, just click on the dates. This is a very useful function. There is also a search tool for the website, therefore this website is very user supportive.

Overall
This website is pretty good, as someone who also creates websites, I would give 8 over 10 for the website. The user friendly functions are great, but there are too little pictures on the website, making it less interesting.


what i have done. =)

REFLECTION FOR PRACTICAL 6

Practical 6 requires us to use a website that we have researched on for portfolio part 1, and do evaluation on them. There were several factors to condsider while doing the evaluation. They are, purpose, coverage, authority, accuacy, currency, accessiblitiy, presentation and arrangement, usablility and overall. There was only 1 website to do, so i got it done pretty quickly. I went back to my biblography to get the link for the website, and went to check the requirements of the website. Alothough i finished it fast, there was quite alot to do. Based on this excercise, i think that it reminded me of what i had learnt in the eariler lessons, i treated this as a revision.

UIR BLOGGING ASSIGNMENT

Search Engine

Example used : google.com

Impact of drug abuse on youths
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=impact%20of
%20drug%20abuse%20on%20youths&hl=en&lr=&oi=scholart

purpose ; news Hits: 24500



Meta Search Engine

Example used : dog pile.com

Impact of drug abuse on youths
http://www.gdcada.org/dii/i/i.htm

purpose : infomation Hits: 82



Subject Directory

Example used : www.galaxy.com/

Impact of drug abuse on youths
http://www.samhsa.gov/

purpose : information + news Hits: 735


Compare the search results. Identify 2 characteristics that make all 3 search facilities similar or different from one another.

The search engine for google returned the most amount of hits as compared to meta search engine and the subject directory. The meta search engine dogpile.com returned least amount of hits, but the search returned more relevant resuts. Finally, the subject directory returned the midrange amount of hits, and the results are mostly relevant, and provide the best information if the correct keywords are used. Also, google is the easiest to use, followed by the meta search engine, and finally, the subject directory.


Do you find any strength/weakness of each of them, in terms of search capability?

Yes.

Search engine-
Strengths : easy to use, most popular as compared to the other 2.
Weakness: some results that are returned may not be relevant.

Meta Search Engine –
Strengths : fairly easy to use, Results returned are relevant.
Weakness : The popularity is lower, resulting in less usage, and the amount of results returned are fairly low.

Subject Directories –
Strengths : Can let use do very detailed searches.
Weakness : hard to use, and least popular.


Overall, which search facility best meet your searching needs? Why?

I thought google was the best for me. Because its easy to use and it always gives me the widest range of relevant amount of websites. Even if it is not as relevant as the other 2, even though the searches return more relevant results, they are harder to use, and therefore, I choose google, for its ease of use and the stability of search results.



Comment whether your research topic has any co-relation to the purposes of the resources retrieved.

Mostly yes. My research topic is the impact of drug abuse on youths, and the resources that I found were mostly related to my topic. However, when using google, some irrelevant search results were returned. But using the meta search engines and subject directories, the results were all accurate and good. So overall, I found the results to be useful for my understanding of the topic.



My reflection : I had learnt that other then the normal search engines that we always use, there are actually other kinds that we can use to find out more detailed and relevant infomation if need, however, those websites can be somewhat harder to use, and the interfaces are less user-friendly.

UIR PRACTICAL 3 BLOG

These are the links to the sites that i have researched for the practical.

Resource 1: http://www.jointogether.org/news/features/2003/youth-drug-use-declines-but.html

Purpose of resource : News

The reasons are : This is news because it is a feature story by a journalist.
Also, this is taken from a news section of a website.


Resource 2: http://www.jointogether.org/news/features/2003/youth-drug-use-declines-but.html

Purpose of resource : News and infomation

The reasons are : This page gives us information on the effects of teen smoking.
It also is a piece of online news taken from a news section of a website.


Resource 3: http://pushingback.com/blogs/pushing_back/archive/2006/09/07/703.aspx

Purpose of resource : Infomation

The reasons are : This webpage tells us about the dropping rate of the youth drug abusers.
It also tells us the impact of drug abuse.


Resource 4: http://www.sadd.org/store.htm

Purpose of resource : Business

The reasons are : This websites store sells things that helps youths addicted to drugs.

Reflection : The activity today gave me an insight of the further detailed types of websites, and the different kind of infomation i could get from each kind of site. therefore, i learnt that for different kind of infomation, i could get them from different sites.

UIR BLOGGING ASSIGMENT 1

For this weeks topic, mine was the impact of drug abuse on youths.

The first website : http://www.nationalyouth.com/substanceabuse.html

Resource Description : This website helps parents and professionals alike in providing education and information.

The second website : http://www.unodc.org/youthnet/youthnet_youth_drugs.html

Resource Description : This website gives information on what drugs are to how to take action on those youths abusing them.

The third website : http://www.nida.nih.gov/nida_notes/NNVol11N3/Protective.html

Resource Description : This webpage is a report on the impact of drug abuse on youths.

The fourth website : http://www.nida.nih.gov/Infofacts/HSYouthtrends.html

Resource Description : Provides trends on the drug abusing by youths.

The forum : http://www.ycwa.org/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1151576970

Resource Description : It is a thread of a crime watch forum.

My reflection on the searching activity: I used google as my search engine because i have been using it for a long time, and i think that the infomation and the sequence of website that is shown as results are better then other search engines. I also learn that even though sometimes you have already, typed in keywords, the results returned may not be correct. This maybe due to the wrong placement of the sequence of the keywords.

hohoho

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